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I'd rather read the prompt

claytonwramsey.com

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Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#261

Post by tabbott »

I have a very similar experience. Some students who want to get involved in contributing to open source will try to contribute to Zulip by taking whatever they wanted to say and asking ChatGPT to write it better for them, and posting the result.

Even when no errors are introduced in the process, the outcome is always bad: 3 full paragraphs of text with bullets and everything where the actual information is just the original 1-2 sentences that the model was prompted with.

I never am happy reading one of those; it's just a waste of time. A lot of the folks doing it are not native English speakers. But for their use case, older tools like Grammarly that help improve the English writing are effective without the problematic decompression downsides of this class of LLM use.

Regardless of how much LLMs can be an impactful tool for someone who knows how to use one well, definitely one of the impacts of LLMs on society today is that a lot of people think that they can improve their work by having an LLM edit it, and are very wrong.

(Sometimes, just telling the LLM to be concise can improve the output considerably. But clearly many people using LLMs think the overly verbose style it produces is good.)

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#262

Post by palata »

zeroq wrote: post #255
sn9 wrote: post #221

> I should hope that the purpose of a class writing exercise is not to create an artifact of text but force the student to think; a language model produces the former, not the latter. It's been incredibly blackpilling seeing how many intelligent professionals and academics don't understand this, especially in education and academia. They see work as the mere production of output, without ever thinking about how that…

You're missing trees for forest. When I was a kid and got an assignement for writing an essey about "why good forces prevailed in Lords of the Rings" as a gate check to see if I actually read the novel I had three choices: (a) read the novel and write the essey myself (b) find an already written essey - not an easy task in pre-internet era but we had books with esseys on most common topics you could "copy-paste" - an…

essay*

(I don't usually do that, but it appears so many times in the first few sentences that I had to do it here)

I agree with your points, though, but I think that they are in agreement with the comment you are answering to...

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#263

Post by bsder »

satisfice wrote: post #111
_qswe wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the author has a fair take on the types of LLM output he has experience with, but may be overgeneralizing his conclusion. As shown by his example, he seems to be narrowly focusing on the use case of giving the AI some small snippet of text and asking it to stretch that into something less information-dense — like the stereotypical "write a response to this email that says X", and sending that output instead o…

If you present your AI-powered work to me, and I suspect you employed AI to do any of the heavy lifting, I will automatically discount any role you claim to have had in that work. Fairly or unfairly, people (including you) will inexorably come to see anything done with AI as ONLY done with AI, and automatically assume that anyone could have done it. In such a world, someone could write the next Harry Potter and it wi…

> someone could write the next Harry Potter and it will be lost in a sea of one million mediocre works that roughly similar.

To be fair, the first Harry Potter is a kinda average British boarding school story. Rowling is barely an adequate writer (and it shows badly in some of the later books). There was a reason she got rejected by so many publishers.

However, Netscape was going nuts and the Internet was taking off. Anime was going nuts and produced some of the all time best anime. MTV animation went from Beavis and Butthead to Daria in this time frame. Authors were engaging with audiences on Usenet (see: Wheel of Time and Babylon 5). Fantasy had moved from counterculture for hardcore nerd boys to something that the bookish female nerds would engage with.

Harry Potter dropped onto that tinder and absolutely caught fire.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#264

Post by IshKebab »

andy99 wrote: post #6

I used to teach, years before LLMs, and got lots of copy-pasted crap submitted. I always marked it zero, never mentioning plagiarism (which would require some university administration) and just commenting that I asked for X and instead got some pasted together nonsense. As long as LLM output is what it is, there is little threat of it actually being competitive on assignments. If students are attentive enough to par…

Yeah this is what I did the one time I invigilated/marked a Matlab exam. Very obvious cheating (e.g. getting the right answer with incorrect code). But no way was I going through the admin of accusing them of cheating. They just got a 0.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#265

Post by jrmg »

soerxpso wrote: post #253
sn9 wrote: post #221

> I should hope that the purpose of a class writing exercise is not to create an artifact of text but force the student to think; a language model produces the former, not the latter. It's been incredibly blackpilling seeing how many intelligent professionals and academics don't understand this, especially in education and academia. They see work as the mere production of output, without ever thinking about how that…

> I should hope that the purpose of a class writing exercise is not to create an artifact of text but force the student to think I'm there for the degree. If I wanted to learn and engage with material, I could save $60,000 and do that online for free, probably more efficiently. The purpose of a class writing exercise is to get the university to give me the degree, which I cannot do by actually learning the material (…

The work this degree will credential you for is so is so disconnected from the areas of study in your degree program - presumably in the same field as the job - that the majority of the things you might learn would not be valuable?

I can’t imagine this in my own life. I use concrete things and ways of thinking and working I learned in my CS degree _all the time_.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#266

Post by Aeolun »

charlieyu1 wrote: post #220
jsheard wrote: post #74

I'm far from the first to make this observation but LLMs are like anti-compression algorithms when used like that, a simple idea gets expanded into a bloated mess by an LLM, then sent to someone else who runs it through another LLM to summarize it back to something approximating the original prompt. Nobody benefits aside from Sam Altman and co, who get to pocket a cool $0.000000001 for enabling this pointless exercis…

I blame humans. I never understand why unnecessarily long writing is required in a lot of places.

Rituals are significant because they are long. A ritual that consisted of the words “Rain please” wouldn’t convince the gods, much less their human followers.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#267

Post by raincole »

pessimizer wrote: post #232
eric_cc wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using llm’s for papers does not mean your brain is atrophying though. There are lots of ways to challenge the mind even if you use llm’s to write some papers.

If you used a wheelchair every day, your legs would atrophy. Regardless of the existence of other ways to exercise your legs which you also will not do, because you're a person with working legs who chooses to use a wheelchair.

Many people with working legs choose to drive. It doesn't mean they don't go to the gym. Actually people even drive to the gym! (surprise, I know)

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#268

Post by drewcoo »

sn9 wrote: post #221

> I should hope that the purpose of a class writing exercise is not to create an artifact of text but force the student to think; a language model produces the former, not the latter. It's been incredibly blackpilling seeing how many intelligent professionals and academics don't understand this, especially in education and academia. They see work as the mere production of output, without ever thinking about how that…

>> the purpose of a class writing exercise

> how many intelligent professionals and academics don't understand this

Mastery of a discipline does not imply any pedagogical knowledge, despite anything one of my childhood heroes, Richard Feynman, might have claimed.

Despite frequent claims otherwise, in my experience and sampling of PhDs and Masters of different sorts and grad students working toward those degrees, an advanced degree does not teach anyone how to lead or teach. This is true of even some of the folks I knew studying Education itself who were a little too focused on their own research to understand anything "so simple."

> cheat themselves out of an education

What's "an education," though? For some people, education is focused on how to learn. For others, it's focused on some kind of certification to get a job. Some of us see value in both. And I'm sure there are other minority opinions as well. We, as a society, can't agree. The only thing we can seem to agree on in the US is that college should be expensive and saddle students with ridiculous debt.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#269

Post by efavdb »

soerxpso wrote: post #253
sn9 wrote: post #221

> I should hope that the purpose of a class writing exercise is not to create an artifact of text but force the student to think; a language model produces the former, not the latter. It's been incredibly blackpilling seeing how many intelligent professionals and academics don't understand this, especially in education and academia. They see work as the mere production of output, without ever thinking about how that…

> I should hope that the purpose of a class writing exercise is not to create an artifact of text but force the student to think I'm there for the degree. If I wanted to learn and engage with material, I could save $60,000 and do that online for free, probably more efficiently. The purpose of a class writing exercise is to get the university to give me the degree, which I cannot do by actually learning the material (…

If this attitude prevails I would think the value of degrees will quickly diminish.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#270

Post by cwalv »

oncallthrow wrote: post #37

LLM cheating detection is an interesting case of the toupee fallacy. The most obvious ChatGPT cheating, like that mentioned in this article, is pretty easy to detect. However, a decent cheater will quickly discover ways to conduce their LLM into producing text that is very difficult to detect. I think if I was in the teaching profession I'd just leave, to be honest. The joy of reviewing student work will inevitably b…

> there is 0 way of telling if the work is real or not, at which point why bother?

I might argue you couldn't really tell if it was "real" before LLMs, either. But also, reviewing work without some accompanying dialogue is probably rarely considered a joy anyway.

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